ourse I know _that_." She spoke as if her
friend's point were small.

Mrs. Stringham tried to enlarge it. "Well, what I mean is that he
didn't say to me anything that he hasn't said to yourself."

"Really?--I would in his place!" She might have been disappointed, but
she had her good humour. "He tells me to _live_"--and she oddly limited
the word.

It left Susie a little at sea. "Then what do you want more?"

"My dear," the girl presently said, "I don't 'want,' as I assure you,
anything. Still," she added, "I _am_ living. Oh yes, I'm living."

It put them again face to face, but it had wound Mrs. Stringham up. "So
am I then, you'll see!"--she spoke with the note of her recovery. Yet
it was her wisdom now--meaning by it as much as she did--not to say
more than that. She had risen by Milly's aid to a certain command of
what was before them; the ten minutes of their talk had in fact made
her more distinctly aware of the presence in her mind of a new idea. It
was really perhaps an old idea with a new value; it had at all events
begun during the last hour, though at first but feebly, to shine with a
special light. That was because in the morning darkness had so suddenly
descended--a sufficient shade of night to bring out the power of a
star. The dusk might be thick yet, but the sky had comparatively
cleared; and Susan Shepherd's star from this time on continued to
twinkle for her. It was for the moment, after her passage with Milly,
the one spark left in the heavens. She recognised, as she continued to
watch it, that it had really been set there by Sir Luke Strett's visit
and that the impressions immediately following had done no more than
fix it. Milly's reappearance with Mr. Densher at her heels--or, so
oddly perhaps, at Miss Croy's heels, Miss Croy being at Milly's--had
contributed to this effect, though it was only with the lapse of the
greater obscurity that Susie made that out. The obscurity had reigned
during the hour of their friends' visit, faintly clearing indeed while,
in one of the rooms, Kate Croy's remarkable advance to her intensified
the fact that Milly and the young man were conjoined in the other. If
it hadn't acquired on the spot all the intensity of which it was
capable, this was because the poor lady still sat in her primary gloom,
the gloom the great benignant doctor had practically left behind him.

The intensity the circumstance in question _might_ wear to the informed
imagination would have bee